


Miss Pauling and the Case of the Disappearing Dispenser

by PreludeInZ



Series: The Morbid, Macabre, and Myriad Adventures of Miss Edith Amelia Pauling [4]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Ambulation, Baseball, F/M, Fluff, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:35:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2554769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I will always tell you what is going to happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miss Pauling and the Case of the Disappearing Dispenser

Her alternator was on the blink again. She was going to need to stop off and see Engie. First, though, she had to find out what the deal was with the dispenser.

Likely nothing. Scout had been the one who’d called her about it, so almost certainly nothing. Probably it was just an outlandish story he’d made up, to divert her attention and try and ask her out again.  _But_ , it was also possible that he was telling the truth, and it would be imprudent not to check.  

Miss Pauling was extremely prudent. 

She glanced in her rearview mirror, idly fixed her hair. Tried to remember if she’d brushed her teeth that morning. Obviously neither of those things mattered, not really, out in the Badlands, but she was a  _professional._

What the hell was Scout doing in the middle of nowhere with a dispenser, anyway? She’d had to change course from a trip to the mineshafts under Coal Town to drop off a box of skulls that she’d found behind a filing cabinet. They were from before her time, which were the most annoying kind of skulls to find. Why hadn’t they been thrown away? She had no idea. A day full of mysteries.

Literally, it was the middle of nowhere when she pulled her truck to a halt on the shoulder of the highway, parked. Scout was about fifty feet from the side of the road, and he looked up when she climbed out of the cab of the truck. He had about half a dozen baseballs littering the ground at his feet, a radio and a few bottles of water scattered among them, and his bat over his shoulder. He waved.

“Hey! Watch! Miss Pauling, hang out right there, a sec, ‘kay?  _Watch_.”

Scout tossed a ball in the air, and with a crack like a gunshot, sent it flying into the late afternoon sun. She shaded her eyes and watched it fall out of the sky, a long way away. She clapped, obligingly. He laughed, whooped, tossed his bat on the ground.

“Lookit that! Four hundred feet,  _easy_. Miss Pauling, that is practically a record. Pretty sure. That was a really good one, I gotta go find out how far that one went. C’mon, it’s hot out, you want some water?”

Miss Pauling patted her hair again, absently, and picked her way carefully across the rocky ground. “I’m all right. Scout, you called me about a dispenser? You’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“Ain’t, s’only about half an hour back to Badwater.”

“By  _car_. On the highway.”

There was a device on the ground, along with the baseballs and water bottles, a long stick with a wheel on the end. Scout picked it up, along with a water bottle. “Engie’s gonna pick me up. Umm, soon. Kinda part of the problem. C’mon, I wanna know about that last one, we can walk an’ talk. You sure you don’t want water? I’ll bring two.”

“You called about a dispenser?” He had already wandered off, cheerfully ticking his way along with the measuring wheel. She didn’t have much choice but to follow. “Did you need to get ahold of Engie about it? I don’t know much about dispensers, Scout.”

“Umm. Yeah. Umm. Well. See, this’s the thing. You ever seen one of these guys before?” He indicated the device he was pushing along. “Engie lent it to me. Measures distances. Neat little thing, wish I’d had one growin’ up. I used to be in  _way_  better shape’n I am now—I know that’s hard to believe—least as far as hittin’ a ball went. Tryin’ to get my edge back, been bashin’ people in the head for too many years. Anyway. He, uh, he asked me to do him a favour, though.”

Miss Pauling had to trot to keep up. Scout noticed and slowed down, obligingly. Fifty feet. “What favour?”

Scout shrugged. “Well, you know how Engie is always gettin’ up to stuff. Experiments and whatnot. He asked if I wanted to borrow his measuring dealie, hit a few balls around. I said sure, I ain’t got anything better to do, never done it before. He just wanted to set up a dispenser out here, have me keep an eye on it for him.” Scout stopped, pried a stone out of the well of the wheel. “Keep an eye out for that ball, sometimes takes me a while to find ‘em.”

Well, this was just ridiculously transparent. If he had  _asked_ her to go for a walk, she might even have said yes. This was just coercion. “I didn’t see a dispenser.”

“Yeeeeeah. Well. That’s the problem. Miss Pauling, you can call me a liar, I ain’t gonna blame you, but the damn thing just vanished.”

“You are a  _terrible_  liar.”

He looked a little hurt at this. “Well, no,  _just_ a liar, you ain’t gotta go an’ throw  _terrible_  on top of that, that ain’t fair. I’m plenty good at lyin’ when I put my mind to it, it’s only cause I  _ain’t actually lyin’_ at the moment that you don’t believe me. See?”

Miss Pauling stopped, sighed. Scout could sometimes be so earnest about a thing that it was almost easy not to notice when he didn’t make any sense. “The dispenser. Disappeared. You were watching it, it just poofed away into thin air?”

Two-hundred feet. “Uh. Not as such. Look, it is a big ol’ hunka metal, didn’t figure it needed much watchin’. An he gave me the damn ticky measuring thing, of course I’m gonna be wanderin’ off to measure stuff with it. I was off gettin’ a ball, I came back, Dispenser was gone. Hey, halfway to my record, how ‘bout that? You gotta be at least a little impressed, Miss Pauling.”

Currently, she was more worried that someone had come down the highway and absconded with a proprietary and semi-experimental piece of Mann Co technology. And now she was muddled up in it, and would be blamed and then fired and then buried in a shallow grave by someone who was less talented at burying people than she was. “Oh my god.”

Scout beamed at her. “I know, right? You wanna keep this one when we find it? Stick it on your desk! Something to remember me by.”

She grabbed him by the elbow, stopped him short, started tugging him along back to the highway.

"Aw, Miss Pauling! We’re like halfway there, c’mon!"

“I don’t care about your stupid ball, Scout! Do you have  _any_  idea how much trouble I’m going to get into for this? Augh.  _Ugh_. I’m going to need to get them to shut down the highway,  _again_ , this is worse than the time Demo got away with Sniper’s van!” She groaned. “We had to bribe  _so many_ state troopers.  _I_ did _._ Me,  _personally._ I had to bribe so many goddamn state troopers. I’m never going to get away with speeding in this state  _again_ , they all know me by sight now. They know I’m the one with the briefcases full of _money_.”

Scout had a way about him when he got in trouble, a sort of devil-may-care grin and a shrug, a certain look that Miss Pauling  _hated_ , because somehow it always got him off the hook. Or at least off with just a warning. She hadn’t figured out how that kept happening. It was her about to get in trouble, though, and this he seemed to take seriously. “Shit. Uh. Miss Pauling,  _no one_  came down that damn highway. Not ‘til you did. I know it sounds crazy, but the damn thing just…hell, I dunno. Grew a pair of legs and walked off, I guess.”

 _This has ruined my Thursday_. It had almost been a nice little walk. She had almost wondered how far he had hit the stupid damn ball. “When was Engie supposed to come get you?”

“I dunno, soonish.” He was trotting to keep up with her, now, she was storming back towards her truck, trying to remember how much further she would need to go down the road to get the radio back, there were a couple dead spots along Highway 550. “Aw, hell, Miss Pauling, I didn’t mean to get you in trouble…”

“Well, hurry up, maybe we can still head this off.”

There was Engie’s truck, now. Pulling up behind her own. She broke into a jog. Nearly tripped on a rock and broke her neck. Slowed down. Felt a hand catch her elbow, steadying her.

“Jesus, Miss Pauling, be  _careful_.”

Engie was climbing down out of his truck, bigger than hers, a bit beefier, with a hitch on the back. “Afternoon, Miss Pauling,” he called, cheerfully. “Scout, where’d that dispenser wander off to?”

“…aw god.” This was muttered under his breath, as he stopped short behind Miss Pauling. He didn’t step past her, she realized she was being used as a human shield. This was not entirely an unreasonable thing to be afraid of, Miss Pauling had been told off by Engie before, for buying the wrong kind of oil for her truck. She glowered over her shoulder at Scout, stepped back, shoved him in front. “Ow, Jesus. Oh, man. Okay, well, listen. See, here’s the thing about the dispenser, an’  _don’t get mad_ …”

Engie had brought a little remote control type device, was fiddling with buttons and dials. “Shoot, locator’s gone screwy. Well, can’t have gotten far. Did you see which way it was headed?”

“…headed,” Scout repeated blankly. “I, uh. Was off after a ball. Four-hundred, twenty-eight feet, Dell, you should’ve  _seen_ that one.”

“Hoo-boy, sure wish I had. Damn, son, you ain’t good for much, but you sure can knock the hide off a ball when you feel like it.” The Engineer was grinning. “Tell ya what, we run that dispenser to ground, you hit a couple more. What’re you averagin’?”

“Oh, hell, I dunno, I ain’t good with math. Uh. Mostly over three-seventy, I ain’t bothered with measurin’ most of ‘em. I’m way outta shape, like I told you…”

The badlands were all rocks and stones, washed out, dried up creekbeds every now and again. Gullies. Little crevices that spread the surface of the desert apart. Like the one Miss Pauling was staring at now, about a hundred yards off, with a dispenser inverted into it. A pair of aftermarket, robotic legs locomoting comically, pathetically in the air. She sighed and pointed. “Uh. Guys.”

Engie’s grin broadened when he spotted it. “ _There_  it is. Knew it hadn’t got far. Ya’ll hang on a minute, won’t take me long and I’ll set her back up. You stickin’ around, Miss Pauling?” He clapped a hand on Scout’s shoulder. “Hell of a thing when this kid hits a ball.”

“I saw, actually. Really impressive. I wish I could stay, but I’ve got a box of skulls in the truck and they need getting rid of. It’s my last job for today, I want to go home and wash my hair after.” Those damn skulls. Stupid skulls, they weren’t going anywhere without her. By way of apology, “I do mean it, Scout, I’ve only ever seen you hitting people in the face. You are very good at baseballs.”

He grinned like he hadn’t had anything to forgive her for in the first place. Probably he didn’t realize he had. “Aw, knock it off.  Dell, you need a hand with that thing? Wish you’d warned me it was gonna go wandering off, bet it’s funny as hell to watch.”

Miss Pauling left, waving goodbye when she pulled back onto the highway, heading back towards Coal Town, genuinely sorry she couldn’t stay.

On the way back, though, well after the sun had gone down, she made a pitstop. It took about an hour and a flashlight and she had to fight a scorpion for it, but she found the stupid baseball.

**Author's Note:**

> When I was little, my family lived in an old farmhouse next to some chicken barns. Now, chicken barns are pretty terrible, but there was a good long way between our house and the chicken barns. I was only about ten when we lived there, though, so my memory of the place isn’t great. They were maybe about a hundred miles away, but I remind you, I was ten. Anyway, my favourite thing in the summers was when my dad would get out the bat and ball I used to practice for my laughable and short career on our town’s peewee softball team. He would hit baseballs for me to try and catch, but mostly to chase, into the field that separated our house and the chicken barns. I had a little steel blue baseball glove. I swear to god, one time he hit a ball so far it bounced off the roof of one of those big silver barns, and it was the best day ever.
> 
> The summer when Miss Pauling was ten was the first year her father forgot to send someone to pick her up from Saint Agathe’s School for Girls.


End file.
